Beijing: Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the China-based Alibaba Group, on Wednesday announced to open a new data centre in India that will help nearly 51 million Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) begin their Cloud journey.

The Alibaba data centre, set to open in Mumbai in January, will begin a new competition for the existing players like Microsoft and Google in the country.

Microsoft sees Alibaba as the third competitor in the Cloud business in India, apart from Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We are excited to be officially opening our new Mumbai data centre in early 2018, enabling us to work closely with more Indian enterprises,” Simon Hu, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud, said in a statement.

“These local enterprises are innovative and operating in growth sectors, and we look forward to empowering them through our Cloud computing and data technologies,” Hu added.

As a key market in the company’s cloud’s globalisation strategy, India offers business opportunity for rapid economic growth and scope for enterprises to expand beyond the country.

“Our vision to empower enterprises to go global is extended to our Indian clients with cloud products, including computing, storage and big data processing capabilities,” the company said.

The data centre will also enable Indian businesses to run their applications on the company’s Cloud platform.

Indo-Asian News Service